Buying a Laptop without xxxxing Vista on?

[chrisdarkfire]

Surely not a strange question in this day and age but seem to be as rare as rocking horse shit

Comments

[king_prawn]

Where have you looked? Have you looked at dealers that specialize (or deal exclusively) in refurbished laptops? I think it was only a year ago you could still go direct to Dell for a laptop with XP still on.

[chrisdarkfire]

Just been surfing and the usual sites - I guess I could go refurb but wary of the quality and potential problems.

[king_prawn]

Hmmm. Just looking at Dell, it looks like there's only one new laptop with XP and it's very expensive. But at the U.S. site they do refurbed laptops with XP for not a lot of money at all. If you could wait, I could bring one back in January.

Here is one with XP at PC World for less than £300.

[king_prawn]

And there are lots and lots of refurbed ones on Amazon with XP.

[aoakley]

So long as you don't want games, Ubuntu does everything MS-Windows does, only better, more stable and with a flashier desktop.

I use it on my Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop and on my home desktop machine.

The "Pidgin" messaging program connects to MSN Messenger etc.

[chrisdarkfire]

Yeah the Dell deal seems to be the best I can find - seems the right to make the full change as I'm doing far less 'stuff' these days other than what I listed above all of which are as good if not better than the MS alternatives.

Would just prefer to be able to walk into any PC vendor and have a proper look at machines with a variety of OS's on them rather than just Vista (with two very expensive Macs in a corner somewhere).

[chrisdarkfire]

Just out of interest what are the options for Firewall as it looks as if Zonealarm is MS only?

[aoakley]

By default, Ubuntu is installed with no open ports. The default install doesn't need a firewall, as the default install doesn't accept any unexpected inbound traffic anyway. For instance, file sharing is turned off by default.

Once you do start turning on things like file sharing, you may feel happier by also installing a firewall.

Ubuntu ships with several firewall tools. From version 6.06 to 8.04, the graphical front-end is called Firestarter. Ubuntu from 8.10 onwards also includes a new, improved firewall front-end called GUFW as well as the old Firestarter. Go with GUFW if you have 8.10.

GUFW may already be installed on Ubuntu 8.10 but if not, like most Ubuntu programs, you don't need to download and install these programs manually. Just select them from Synaptic (System menu -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager) and it will download and install automatically. Make sure you install either Firestarter or GUFW, not both or they may argue about who has priority

[djvext]

You are the Linux netbook demographic :)